


Finding Faith

by futurelounging



Series: FuLo's Other Outlander Tales [7]
Category: Outlander & Related Fandoms, Outlander Series - Diana Gabaldon
Genre: Catholicism, Death in Childbirth, Gen, Implied/Referenced Death in Childbirth, Pre Canon, Religion, faith - Freeform, name origin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-05
Updated: 2018-12-05
Packaged: 2019-09-07 15:36:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16856683
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/futurelounging/pseuds/futurelounging
Summary: Based on a prompt for Other Outlander Tales on TumblrAnon: Mother Hildegarde went "against the rules" and baptized Faith. I would love to read her point of view... making her decision, deciding on the name Faith, preparing herself to tell Claire, for example.Hildegarde goes through hardship in her early life and learns what faith means.





	Finding Faith

“Hilde!” Her father’s stern voice startled her, and her fingers flew off the keys as if burned.

“I’m sorry.” Her eyes did not meet his as she tried to shrink away, impossible as that was. At thirteen she’d already surpassed the height of most men she knew, though not her father, who was forever ducking under doorways and knocking his knees on tables.

“I’m not upset, my dear, only that I have been asking you for several minutes to cease playing and you seem to be completely deaf to my request. Where do you go when you are playing?” His face had softened, and he looked upon her with curiosity.

“Go? I am just here.” She could not say to him that the notes she played clasped her spirit and carried it on some secret wind. That she could close her eyes and disappear in the music and not feel the ache in her young bones from the endless toil of cooking and cleaning and laundering. He would feel guilty for it if she admitted she escaped from her life when she played.

Her father worked hard to care for his family, but it was only ever just enough. His woodworking talent was immense, but he’d not been willing to unmoor his family from their village for the more lucrative opportunities of Paris. He’d not have his children lost to those sinful streets.

Her father’s faith was contained in every facet of their lives, sometimes shrouding, sometimes glorifying. He praised the Lord for guiding their hands. His own as he carved wood. His wife’s as she found tenderness beneath the calluses to hold her children to her breast. His eldest daughter’s for the glorious ease with which they drew beauty from the keys.

When Hilde was five years old, she’d accompanied her father to deliver a finished table to a patron, an elderly man whose wife had recently died, leaving him bereft. As her father spoke with the man, she had settled onto the cushioned bench before the man’s harpsichord and begun to press the keys, marveling at how the row above would move accordingly. She had then begun to experiment with multiple keys at once until she struck chords that rang true, a wide smile breaking across her face.

Her father had rushed into the room once he’d realized what she’d done and apologized, but the patron had stilled him with a hand to his arm and merely smiled at Hilde, who shyly smiled back. One week later, the harpsichord was delivered to their home.

In the intervening years, Hilde learned to read music and began writing her own pieces, the sheets of paper piling up in a box her father built expressly to hold her creations. And in these years, her mother birthed more children. The house’s walls grew closer together.

Two days before her seventeenth birthday, Hilde waved goodbye to her father as he left to meet with a new patron a day’s ride away. He’d promised to return by the next evening and until then, she would take charge of the home. Her mother was well into her eighth month of pregnancy and was racked with worry that she’d lose the baby, as she had the previous one, not two weeks after its birth. But Hilde knew, had felt God’s truth come to her in her evening prayers, that this child would live. That all would be well.

As night fell, storm clouds muted the moonlight and her mother grasped her rosary and cried into her daughter’s shoulder that God had left their home. When her labor began, long before it ought to have, Hilde sent her younger brother to the village to fetch a midwife. He returned an hour later soaked and shivering with no midwife.

The bedding grew red and Hilde’s hands shook as she cradled the cold infant and watched as her mother’s legs fell limp into her own blood.

She had imagined faith to be something essential to her existence. Like air and water or touch. It cast its light upon her work and her hopes and guided her, as it had her father and mother. But now, in the flashing, rumbling violence of the storm, death filled the air and she could find faith nowhere. She gathered her siblings to her skirts and prayed with them, words she spoke with no intention, devoid of the comfort they should have carried.

Her father returned and cried with rage, a terrifying flood of grief their house could not contain. He could not look upon her face without falling apart, without tearing his clothes and fleeing. Death clung to her skin and weaved through her hair. The other children shrunk from her touch, as if her hands still smelled of their mother’s blood.

The days grew longer, grief coloring the air and hanging heavy on their limbs. Hilde began escaping in the early mornings, her long legs clamoring up hills until her lungs pressed painfully against her ribs. She prayed incessantly that God would return to her. That her faith might be restored. But the hollowness persisted, as if she’d been cast into an empty room in the dark, stumbling to find the door.

“Have I sinned so greatly? Did my faith kill them? I was so certain they would be well…” Her voice dissolved in the wind. She fell to her knees under an oak, acorns pressing through the fabric of her skirts to leave grooves in her skin. In the field below, a hawk dove into the tall grasses and emerged seconds later with a mouse in its talons. Ants carried bits of leaves and a dead insect over the tree’s roots, rupturing the earth.

Work. Existence and persistence and survival. She had been wandering, looking for her faith in the ether, but it would not be found there. She understood, then. It was not unhinged from life. In fact, its existence was predicated on the labor of the living, on the goodness of works. Faith held no purpose outside of works, and works were drudgery without the illumination of faith.

She found her father in his workshop, his gnarled hands straining against a clamp. “I wish to join the convent.”

* * *

 

Claire Fraser had walked into L'Hôpital an oblivious disruption, the air parting with a whoosh as she passed. Of all the creatures Hildegarde had been drawn to over the course of her life, Claire had been one of the most mysterious. She could not say exactly what it was about her, only that she was fierce and brave in a way few others were.

On the awful eve Claire was brought to her with her life pooling at her feet, she’d fallen back in time to her mother’s death bed. She felt the horror of that night churning through her, but when she looked into Claire’s eyes, unfocused and pained, Hildegarde swallowed the fear. She had learned her life’s greatest lesson after that night, and it would not fail her now.

Faith exists in works. She would not be here, in this moment, had it not been for that understanding.

When she held the cold infant against her bosom this time, it was not with the helpless loss she had felt in her youth, but the painful embrace of grief. Life clung to Claire, defiant. This woman’s work would not be in vain.

Hildegarde’s hands had held life and death countless times, had touched bone and torn flesh and brushed the caul from the eyes of new life. Claire’s daughter, her life foregone, would not pass a lost soul. She dipped her fingers in the water and touched them to the child, resting her lips on the chilled skin of her forehead. “You are Faith. In your mother, you lived. Through her love for you, she will live”.


End file.
